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August 18, 2003 Vol.74, no. 1F
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| IN GREAT FORM:
Last semester a team of EECS seniors created an online form for
a campus office to be used by visiting scholars to Berkeley. |
Engineers
race to build robots during fifteen minutes of fame
Thanks to a group of engineering
students, Berkeley’s academic departments will have an easier time
processing visas for visiting scholars.
Since September 11, 2001 the department of Immigration and Naturalization
Services (INS) has stepped up its tracking of visiting scholars and
international students, leaving the understaffed Berkeley office of
Services to International Students and Scholars (SISS) scrambling to
meet the new government compliance standards.
Last spring, a team of EECS seniors came to the rescue. As a final project
for their software engineering class, they designed an online form for
SISS. The group, made up of Whi Yong Song, Travis Tam, Varun Chhabra,
Amit Popat, Hamid Aghdaee, and Brycen Chun, turned the paper application
for the J-1 Visa into an online form. The form increases processing
accuracy and speed.
“Now the departments can enter their information and send the URL
to the scholar to fill out online,” says SISS systems manager Dianne
Walker. “If they hadn’t shown up we would have had to do it
a year or two years later because we are understaffed and swamped.”
The group used their EECS expertise to convert the information gathered
by the form into the format required by the INS. They also worked with
end-users to tailor the design to their needs.
SISS was so pleased with the results of the project they hired three
members to work for them over the summer.
While it’s rare for undergraduates to do this kind of research
and create commercially viable products, these students prove that opportunities
do abound on campus. The team now co-owns the technology it created
for the University.
This year, 200 campus departments will use the new online form to invite
approximately 2,500 scholars to campus. .
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